To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent download: Someone Knows, by Lisa Scottoline, a riveting novel about how a single decision can undo a family, how our past can derail our present, and how not guilty doesn’t always mean innocent.

***

Beginning: (Prologue)

Nobody tells you that you’ll do things when you’re young that are so stupid, so unbelievably stupid, so horrifically stupid that years later you won’t be able to believe it. You’ll be on your laptop, or reading a book, or pumping gas, and you’ll find yourself shaking your head because you’ll be thinking no, no, no, I did not do that, I was not a part of that, that could not have happened.

***

Friday 56: He picked up the pace. He didn’t know if he was walking away from something or toward something else, but he kept going. He thought of the bottle he had hidden near the recycling, but he didn’t want to sneak a drink tonight.

***

Synopsis: Allie Garvey is heading home to the funeral of a childhood friend. Allie is not only grief-stricken, she’s full of dread. Because going home means seeing the other two people with whom she shares an unbearable secret.

Twenty years earlier, a horrific incident shattered the lives of five teenagers, including Allie. Drinking and partying in the woods, they played a dangerous prank that went tragically wrong, turning deadly. The teenagers kept what happened a secret, believing that getting caught would be the worst thing that could happen. But time has taught Allie otherwise. Not getting caught was far worse.

Allie has been haunted for two decades by what she and the others did, and by the fact that she never told a soul. The dark secret has eaten away at her, distancing her from everyone she loves, including her husband. Because she wasn’t punished by the law, Allie has punished herself, and it’s a life sentence.

Now, Allie stands on the precipice of losing everything. She’s ready for a reckoning, determined to learn how the prank went so horribly wrong. She digs to unearth the truth, but reaches a shocking conclusion that she never saw coming–and neither will the reader.

***

I love this author’s books, so I always believe I’m in for a treat when I grab one. What do you think?

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent download: The Night Visitors, by Carol Goodman, is a story of mistaken identities and missed chances, forgiveness, and vengeance.

***

Beginning: (Alice)

Oren falls asleep at last on the third bus. He’s been fighting it since Newburgh, eyelids heavy as wet laundry, pried up again and again by sheer stubbornness. Finally, I think when he nods off. If I have to answer one more of his questions, I might lose it.

***

Friday 56: I’m about to tell him no, we’ve got more important things to do, but then I think of all the promises he’s seen broken. “Absolutely. I know a great hill. Go pick out a sled. There are a couple in the barn.”

***

Synopsis: ALICE gets off a bus in the middle of a snowstorm in Delphi, NY. She is fleeing an abusive relationship and desperate to protect…

OREN, ten years old, a major Star Wars fan and wise beyond his years. Though Alice is wary, Oren bonds nearly instantly with…

MATTIE, a social worker in her fifties who lives in an enormous run-down house in the middle of the woods. Mattie lives alone and is always available, and so she is the person the hotline always calls when they need a late-night pickup. And although according to protocol Mattie should take Alice and Oren to a local shelter, instead she brings them home for the night. She has plenty of room, she says. What she doesn’t say is that Oren reminds her of her little brother, who died thirty years ago at the age of ten.

But Mattie isn’t the only one withholding elements of the truth. Alice is keeping her own secrets. And as the snowstorm worsens around them, each woman’s past will prove itself unburied, stirring up threats both within and without.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a new download from an old favorite author: All the Wrong Places, by Joy Fielding: Four women—friends, family, rivals—turn to online dating for companionship, only to find themselves in the crosshairs of a tech-savvy killer using an app to target his victims in this harrowing thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of See Jane Run and The Bad Daughter.

***

Beginning: “So, tell me about yourself,” he says. He smiles what he hopes is a sweet smile—neither too big nor too small, one that hints at a wry, maybe even off-beat sense of humor that he thinks would appeal to her. He wants to charm her. He wants her to like him.

The young woman sitting across from him at the immaculately set table for two hesitates. When she speaks, her voice is soft, tremulous. “What do you want to know?”

***

56: “I need a drink,” she said, marching down the stairs into the kitchen, and reaching into the fridge for the bottle of wine she and Matt had shared at dinner the night before.

***

Synopsis: Online dating is risky—will that message be a sweet greeting or an unsolicited lewd photo? Will he be as handsome in real life as he is in his photos, or were they taken ten years and twenty pounds ago? And when he asks you to go home with him, how do you know it’s safe? The man calling himself “Mr. Right Now” in his profile knows that his perfect hair, winning smile, and charming banter put women at ease, silencing any doubts they might have about going back to his apartment. There, he has a special evening all planned out: steaks, wine, candlelight . . . and, by the end of the night, pain and a slow, agonizing death.

Driven to desperation—by divorce, boredom, infidelity, a beloved husband’s death—a young woman named Paige, her cousin and rival Heather, her best friend, Chloe, and her mother, Joan, all decide to try their hand at online dating. They each download an app, hoping to right-swipe their way to love and happiness.

But one of them unwittingly makes a date with the killer, starting the clock on a race to save her life.

***

I love this author’s books, so I’m eager to dive into this one. What do you think?

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a NetGalley ARC: The Ash Family, by Molly Dektar: the book will be released on April 9, 2019. When a young woman leaves her family—and the civilized world—to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel.

***

Beginning: (Fall)

Bay and I approached the farm at dawn. The first sun churned sideways through the trees, catching in the previous day’s rain, which the wind now shook down from the Carolina silverbells, the beeches, and the poplars. I rolled down the window and heard the forest fizzing.

***

Friday 56%: After lunch, I joined the family in our everyday chores. We had to clean the sheep’s stables, clean the cows’ and horses’ stables, clean the chicken houses, feed and water the chickens, make the cheese and the butter, clean the dairy, move the electric fence, check the flock, and weed, weed, weed. No one mentioned Queen. Pear was nowhere to be found. But I was no longer frightened. They had questioned me, and they had let me go.

***

Synopsis: At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie—now renamed Harmony—renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.

Thrilling and profound, The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging.

***

I am eager to begin the journey with the characters. What do you think?

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent download: Before She Knew Him, by Peter Swanson: From the hugely talented author of The Kind Worth Killing comes an exquisitely chilling tale of a young suburban wife with a history of psychological instability whose fears about her new neighbor could lead them both to murder . . .

***

Beginning: (Witness)

The two couples met at a neighborhood block party, the third Saturday in September.

Hen hadn’t wanted to go, but Lloyd convinced her. “It’s just down the street. If you hate it, you can turn around and come straight back.”

“That’s exactly what I can’t do,” Hen said. “I need to stay at least an hour or else people will notice.”

“They really won’t.”

***

Friday 56:

“Hello,” she said.

“I’m going to have to pat you down, you realize that?” Those were the words he’d been planning on saying first. He was surprised that she looked surprised. (56%).

***

Synopsis: Hen and her husband Lloyd have settled into a quiet life in a new house outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Hen (short for Henrietta) is an illustrator and works out of a studio nearby, and has found the right meds to control her bipolar disorder. Finally, she’s found some stability and peace.

But when they meet the neighbors next door, that calm begins to erode as she spots a familiar object displayed on the husband’s office shelf. The sports trophy looks exactly like one that went missing from the home of a young man who was killed two years ago. Hen knows because she’s long had a fascination with this unsolved murder—an obsession she doesn’t talk about anymore, but can’t fully shake either.

Could her neighbor, Matthew, be a killer? Or is this the beginning of another psychotic episode like the one she suffered back in college, when she became so consumed with proving a fellow student guilty that she ended up hurting a classmate?

The more Hen observes Matthew, the more she suspects he’s planning something truly terrifying. Yet no one will believe her. Then one night, when she comes face to face with Matthew in a dark parking lot, she realizes that he knows she’s been watching him, that she’s really on to him. And that this is the beginning of a horrifying nightmare she may not live to escape. . .

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent download: The Next to Die, by Sophie Hannah, a disturbing tale of psychological suspense and obsession that hits at the heart of some of our most precious relationships.

***

Beginning – (Chapter One): My tip for anyone under scrutiny from the police: as soon as you try to hide something, you make it glaringly visible, like the buildings and bridges that are sometimes wrapped in white cloth by artists, making everyone stare and point at them. Pull off the cloth and you’ve got an unremarkable office block or a congested commuter route across the water; people walk past with their heads down, oblivious.

***

Friday 56: Something was in my mind then that seemed to matter. It escaped before I could grab hold of it.

***

Synopsis: What if having a best friend could put you in the crosshairs of a killer?

A psychopath the police have dubbed “Billy Dead Mates” is targeting pairs of best friends, and killing them one by one. Before they die, each victim is given a small white book.

For months, detectives have failed to catch Billy, or figure out what the white books symbolize and why the killer leaves them behind. The police are on edge; the public in a panic. Then a woman, scared by what she’s seen on the news, comes forward. What she reveals shocks the investigators and adds another troubling layer to an already complex case.

Stand-up comedian Kim Tribbeck has one of Billy’s peculiar little books. A stranger gave it to her at a gig she did last year. Was the stranger Billy, and is he targeting her—or is it something more nefarious? Kim has no friends and trusts no one, so how—and why—could Billy Dead Mates want to target her? If it’s not her, then who will be the next to die?

***

What do you think? I enjoy this author, and I’m eager to jump right into this tale.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent download: I Invited Her In, by Adele Parks, a blistering tale of wanting what you can’t have, jealousy and revenge from Sunday Times bestseller Adele Parks.

***

Beginning: (Melanie)

Monday, 19 February

While the girls are cleaning their teeth, I start to stack the dishwasher. It’s too full to take the breakfast pots—I should have put it on last night. There’s nothing I can do about this now, so I finish making up their packed lunches and then have a quick glance at my phone.

***

Friday 56%: (Abigail)

Abigail had always thought of Melanie as a sturdy, capable person. She remembered when they first met one another in the student union bar twenty years ago. Most students had been standing around looking nervous and overwhelmed; Melanie had struck up a conversation with a couple of botanists or biologists or whatever.

***

Synopsis: When Mel receives an unexpected email from her oldest friend Abi, it brings back memories she thought she had buried forever. Their friendship belonged in the past. To those carefree days at university.

But Abi is in trouble and needs Mel’s help, and she wants a place to stay. Just for a few days, while she sorts things out. It’s the least Mel can do.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a book I just borrowed from the library: The Making of Us, by Lisa Jewell, is a novel about three strangers who are brought together by the father they never knew.

***

Beginning: (1979 – Glenys)

Glenys Pike was thirty-five years old. She had long dark hair and a neck like a swan. Her husband was called Trevor and was five years younger. The idea was that he would keep her feeling young. The truth was that the fact that he had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday made her feel about as old as her grandmother. Trevor meanwhile still had all the swagger and sway of a young man, his hair a fat plume of mahogany, his stomach as smooth and hard as set cement.

***

Friday 56: (Last Summer)

(Robyn)

Robyn Inglis celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a Voltz energy shot and the morning-after pill.

The night before she’d still been seventeen, but she wasn’t having her birthday party on a Sunday night, no way.

***

Synopsis: Lydia, Dean, and Robyn don’t know one another. Yet. Each is facing difficult challenges. Lydia is still wearing the scars from her traumatic childhood. Wealthy and successful, she leads a lonely and disjointed existence. Dean is a young, unemployed, single dad whose life is going nowhere. Robyn is eighteen. Gorgeous, popular, and intelligent, she entered her first year of college confident of her dream to become a pediatrician. Now she’s failing her classes. Now she’s falling in love for the first time.

Lydia, Dean, and Robyn live very different lives, but each of them, independently, has always felt that something was missing. What they don’t know is that a letter is about to arrive that will turn their lives upside down. It is a letter containing a secret—one that will bind them together and show them what love and family and friendship really mean.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent download: Come Find Me, by Megan Miranda, a captivating thriller about two teens who connect when each discovers a mysterious radio frequency, which suggests their family tragedies are mysteriously connected.

Friday 56: There’s some sort of master switch below the fuse box, a red lever, and I pull it to the side. But as I do, the lights brighten for a second, as if there’s a sudden surge of electricity instead of a cutoff. Like the light in the hallway, too bright, buzzing. And then everything goes dead.

***

Synopsis: After surviving an infamous family tragedy, sixteen-year-old Kennedy Jones has made it her mission to keep her brother’s search through the cosmos alive. But then something disturbs the frequency on his radio telescope–a pattern registering where no signal should transmit.

In a neighboring county, seventeen-year-old Nolan Chandler is determined to find out what really happened to his brother, who disappeared the day after Nolan had an eerie premonition. There hasn’t been a single lead for two years, until Nolan picks up an odd signal–a pattern coming from his brother’s bedroom.

Drawn together by these strange signals–and their family tragedies–Kennedy and Nolan search for the origin of the mysterious frequency. But the more they uncover, the more they believe that everything’s connected–even their pasts–as it appears the signal is meant for them alone, sharing a message that only they can understand. Is something coming for them? Or is the frequency warning them about something that’s already here?

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent acquisition: Late in the Day, by Tessa Hadley, explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations.

***

Beginning: They were listening to music when the telephone rang. It was a summer’s evening, nine o’clock. They had finished supper and Christine was listening with intensity, sitting with her feet tucked under her in the armchair; she recognized the music although she didn’t know what it was. Alex had chosen it, he hadn’t consulted her and now she stubbornly wouldn’t ask—he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn’t know.

***

56: Alex’s withdrawn silences, when he was with his friends, didn’t do any harm to the reputation he had as the rarest, most talented among them; and then when he did talk he was original, forceful and funny.

***

Synopsis: The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel).

Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead.

In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

***

Would you keep reading? I am curious about this one, and hope to enjoy it.